i whored for art…

Tag Archives: Islam

Isabelle Schad, in the first space I’ve seen her in, whose architecture really deserves her work (outside of Wiesenburg, of course), at KINDL in Neukölln for INSIDE OUT. I saw first rehearsals on Thursday last week, almost 3 hours of being transfixed. Still the best in town.

Thursday, 16.08.2018, 18:00 – 21:00, world première

17.08.2018, 18:00 – 21:00

18.08.2018, 15:00 – 18:00

19.08.2018, 15:00 – 18:00

Admission possible at any time

In her performative exhibition INSIDE OUT Isabelle Schad shows choreographic sculptures that are experienced in their powerfully sensuous moving forms. Her work situates itself between dance and visual art, draws on her ongoing fascination with Aikido-Zen, community building and her long-term collaboration with Laurent Goldring, whom she invited to participate in INSIDE OUT. With subtle exactness they form bodies, material such as clothing, lengths of fabric and movement into sculptures which define their own space and evolve a contemplative quality.

Continuing with this amended way of blogging about what I’m reading, another small pile of books I picked up a couple of weeks ago and am currently getting through.

Akala came up in my Twit feed a while ago, I watched him utterly destroy at least one idiot white British politician on TV, decided he fitted into where I’m reading at the moment in combinations of UK / London / Colonialism / Black / Grime history, realised he’s the brother of the deadly Ms. Dynamite, laid into it at the same time I was reading Dan Hancox’s Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Pretty much highly recommend Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, even though he’s kinda weak on the feminism / queer side of things — bit of a cishet male bias there, mate — but he’s talking from his own experience growing up as a black boy and man in London, and it’s grim shit we need to hear and read.

Small aside, I went on a Giggs binge last night. First time I heard him was JME’s and his Man Don’t Care. Dasniya said she liked his voice more, something kinda menacing and slow but also “cinnamon tea”. He was live at Roundhouse earlier this year, and closed with Whippin’ Excursion, just watch the crowd fucking lose it when the bass drops, it’s a madness. Then go back to Talkin’ da Hardest in 2007 or even further, 2003, dejavu FM pirate radio and the Conflict DVD. That’s where grime came from, the rooftops of council housing tower-blocks (yeah I know Giggs isn’t grime, but he works with a lot of grime artists, so, keeping it simple here), rough as guts and dead end and set up to fail and go down or die. So belabouring a point here, the political and social significance of someone like Giggs filling the Roundhouse and having a packed crowd go the fuck off … gives me shivers. Good, deep, world-changing shivers.

I haven’t read Charlie Jane Anders’ Six Months, Three Days, Five Others yet. But I’ll always read her. The more of my sisters in this game, the better.

Corinne Duyvis’ On the Edge of Gone I probably heard of from the usual places, io9, or someone in my Twit feed. Reasons for reading: it’s sci-fi, she’s queer, lives in Amsterdam, is autistic. I’m not sold on the ‘science’ part of the science-fiction yet, set in 2035 and interstellar generation ships are a somewhat mature technology — this might be a ruse, but still, large-scale ships for hundreds or thousands of people, able to launch from Schiphol Airport seems improbable for 17 years from now. Maybe I’m reading that part wrong. Nonetheless, an autistic main character — and you all know my love of Feersum Endjinn and Whit. (I’m not even going to tell you about my own neurofuckery and my spreadsheet which I use to remember people I’ve met.)

Obviously I bought Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space for the title. I’m still kinda on the whole, “I don’t really read menz” thing, for so long it’s not even a thing, it’s more of a “I read women authors and non-binary authors on the feminine side of things,” because obviously I want to see my people represented and that means all my people and their people and their people’s people. So sometimes I read a book by a guy. I have this habit, where I read an author’s acknowledgements and count the names and divide them into male-ish, female-ish, and I dunno. Pretty reliably, male author’s female-ish names count tops out around 30%, ’cos we all know 1/3 female feels like half or more than half in the real world. It means I tend to read male authors with suspicion, it’s a question of do they really genuinely care about and practice what we currently call intersectionality, or are they fortunate enough (truly though, I mean impoverished) to not have to make it a necessary part of their lives. So far, then — I’ve only read the first dozen pages — Nigerians in Space is a hilarious sci-fi thriller of straight men making really, really bad irreversible decisions.

Lucky last, Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper. This one via JY Yang and / or various Twit mentions (I’m taking a long pause from the Twit, ’cos it’s not good for my moodiness or neurofuckery), and / or a bunch of South-East Asian blogs in my feed. I dunno what’s happening over Singapore way, but the sci-fi fantasy spec-fic stuff I’ve been reading is on fire. This is her first novel, and reminded me of Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories (or maybe more A Stranger in Olondria). There’s a lot I love in this, but some poor narrative decisions that seem more about manufacturing drama leading to an uncomfortable conclusion where the main character is incarcerated and pregnant and we know her children will be taken away from her to be experimented on. Which is an ongoing reality for colonised indigenous peoples, but here it was more in the vein of the awful Joss Whedon Black Widow trauma porn backstory. There’s a much tighter, more cogent story here that doesn’t rely on weak tropes, and which finesses out the cataclysmic acts of the main character and her sister (I’m ignoring the rich boy, ’cos he could be dropped and the story would only grow). First novel though, another author I’ll read again.

Mixing the NGV’s Triennial and its own collection together as I was decidedly zombie on the day (Paea saw me and laughed), and sometimes not sure where one or the other began or stopped, and saving all the old cruft for a separate post.

Richard Mosse I confused with Trevor Paglen, whose Limit Telephotography and The Black Sites work has been turning up in my reading for over a decade. Mosse is kind of a successor, or working similarly, pushing photographic technology and making deeply political art. Louisa Bufardeci also, though using manual labour to again create something on first view beautiful and aesthetic, which is contextualised into a evidence of and memorial for refugees whose boats sunk at sea off the coast of Australia. Both these works sit uneasily inside Fortress Australia and within the NGV, as Mosse’s second work (which you have to pass through to reach Incoming) describes: the NGV’s former use of Wilson’s security, to whom the government outsourced illegal detention centre policing. (The NGV ended its contract with Wilson’s after artists’ protests, organised by Gabrielle de Vietri and others, though the relationship between arts institutions like the NGV, policing and generations of human rights violations remains largely untouched.)

Onto something slightly more cheerful, or at least I could not wipe the smile off my face watching Adel Abidin’sCover Up! where Marilyn Monroe’s iconic subway scene in The Seven Year Itch is replaced by an Arab man wearing a Kandura (Dishdasha, Thawb) giving me the cheekiest eye as he tries (not very hard) to prevent a flash of leg.

Next to that is Faig Ahmed, with a 21st century Azerbaijani carpet, digitally bleeding and glitching. Hal reminds me of the Afghan War Rugs, cultural memory lossy compression like a jpg, copied and recopied with no line of context to an original, regional signifiers and techniques that say authentic and traditional unfolded as repeating geometric shapes of aircraft carriers, World Trade Centre towers, text like USA and Pepsi, blocks of iconography decoupled from meaning, becoming pattern again.

Timo Nasseri, Epistrophy, op-art cut into the wall like the mid-20th century works of Adolf Luther I saw in Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal. Possibly a new profile photo coming out of that, but not thinking much of it until I looked at more of his work and saw the thread of Islamic / Islamicate architecture and mathematics in it. Good choice for a profile photo, then.

Jumping to the last artist, Nusra Latif Qureshi. She used to come into the VCA Student Union when we were both students. I always loved her art, miniatures in the South Asian tradition (which has connections to mediæval European illuminations, art flowing along the lines of trade as much as trade and commerce), and I was really happy to see her work in the NGV. Again, political, the colonial history of Europe in the unbroken history of Asia-Pacific.

I had thoughts, weaving through the Triennial and the NGV’s permanent collection in my spent, post-festival state. Thoughts. Many. I had. Like, the art that can touch me is always political, because art is inseparable from political, unless the artist has the luxury to be insulated from having political’s gaze turn onto them, so they get to play with ideas and technology and pretend there are no consequences, no urgency, no struggle; they get to live without the violence of history. I see myself in art that is political, even though it is seldom specifically ‘about’ me. I see also a difference between the superficially political, diversity as aesthetic, and art by artists whose lives, by their very existence, is political. I saw the strength of the NGV when it celebrates, represents, amplifies Asia-Pacific and Indigenous artists. This is when it makes sense, not when it assembles an incoherent, contextless junk box of ‘European’ art, manufacturing a phantasmic history of Australia, like Australia was ever located just off the coast of England, or when it divides that into Art and anything pre-Invasion Asia-Pacific into Ethnography. I didn’t see the entirety of the Triennial or the NGV, it’s an awkwardly designed interior space, easy to miss cul-de-sac turn-offs that open to entire wings, more time walking to and from and between than through art. It struggles between competing imperatives, like that of its European fantasy, or oddly misplaced exhibitions that owe more to consular trade and advertising than art and artists. But, see the Triennial? Yes, if you’re in Naarm. There’s good stuff there (heaps I didn’t see, let alone photograph).

I loved this. A fat slab of a book with pages to keep me deep in the story for days. Enough of a story that me — being out of practice with reading lately — couldn’t keep straight all the characters and peoples and factions and histories. The last novel I read like this was Saladin Ahmed’s brilliant Throne of the Crescent Moon, which seems very unlikely to be getting a sequel, as he’s off doing mad words for comics these days — which, for anyone who remembers his long Twitter dives into Golden Age comics, is probably his true home anyway.

Cairo, Djinn, the Ottoman Empire, Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, the Amu Darya, Afghanistan, East Turkestan (yes, I know that last one is awkward), Islamicate worlds where Europe sits far on the fringe, barely mentioned beyond the first chapter where it is already an “away, over there”. This was one on my list, along with a number of other authors, as part of an irregular, waxing and waning effort to read science-fiction and fantasy by non-Anglo-American women and non-binary authors. As usual, no idea where I first saw it, possibly the monthly New Reading list on io9, or maybe on the Twit. Well, I failed with the non- bit, cos S.A. is a white cisgender USA-ian.

I read G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen a few years ago, and (from memory) thought it slipped into awkward orientalism, and there’s a tendency for white converts to Islam (I kinda prefer to say ‘returning to’, but for the Anglo-American lot ‘convert’ is more apt) to be hella strict in going for Arabic, Sunni derivatives, like that’s the only Islam there is, and wrapping themselves up in a holier-than-thou Hijab. Fam, Islam don’t gotta be like that. S.A. doesn’t rock a hijab. Truth, when I saw her name, I thought, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and I live for the day that one ever writes sci-fi or fantasy.

S.A. spent time in Cairo, has done the study, speaks clearly about understanding her place as a white American woman writing Islamic fantasy and history, and her acknowledgements were filled with names that would know what she’s writing about. All that, plus interviews I’ve read with her, plus just how she wrote this story before I knew all these details, I believed it. It brings me a small joy for a story to begin with such unremarkable inclusion of Adhan call to Fajr (that’s the call to dawn prayer, or Sabah namazı), to have Islam so fundamental to a story — not as signifier of whatever white culture wants to denigrate, but a mundane thing which is lived in the world daily. It’s her debut, and frankly a banger, so I’m going to refrain right here from the usual high-class and bourgie criticism-ing I do — except please print it on better paper stock, she deserves so much better. Oh! And it’s the first of a trilogy. I’ll probably have read this again before the second part comes out.

Three weeks later. Well, yes, that was a notably idyllic day, despite absence of sea, mountain, and forest. Partly it’s northern German Berlin winter smashing me once again, but it’s been a grim slog the last two months, and I haven’t had much I felt like writing about, and writing itself felt — and feels — like an effort I’m not capable of. It’s been a year of cheerless news, raking many of us who aren’t part of the ascendant ethno-nationalist lot, like daily sandpaper to the face. And in this, there’s been so many moments of — for want of a better word — progress, as if, after twenty-five years at it, I can see sometimes evidence of being heard. And then, the very ones who have a voice, who are given a platform and an audience, who fucking know better, once again push any mob who isn’t them, part of their group, under their bus.

Sometimes I feel like such an old cunt, doing this battle now into my forties, and it’s all same old, same old. Do you ever fucking listen to us? I’m using the rhetorical ‘us’ here, I slide along the interstices between many groups but feel an outsider in all. I know that it doesn’t matter what I feel, it’s how I’m seen and marked, and I know that even if I am not part of a group, I cannot fight for my life without fighting for theirs. In all this, there’s one group which can be relied on to not do the same.

White, cisgender women can’t be trusted. Their feminism also. Whether hetero or lesbian or queer, the history in my life of white cisgender women who call themselves feminist is they will fuck the rest of us over, whoever we are. They don’t see us as equal or deserving or really even human. I’m tired of them opening their mouths and some transphobic, racist, Islamophobic, anti-sex worker, anti-BDSM, colonialist, ableist, or any and all of the other –ist shit coming out. I’m tired of them not getting it, not learning, not listening, not educating themselves. I’m tired of the unnecessary shit they bring down on everyone not them.

We have obligations, wherever we are located in the hierarchy of shit, to those who have it harder than we do. We need to understand where we are located in this hierarchy, individually and as members of multiple groups, and how this location has shifted over history and place; that the primary agenda of any of the groups is only a sub-set of the larger, hundreds of years old struggle for emancipation and restitution for us all. You don’t ever advance your own agenda by shitting on those below.

I mainly wrote this after yet another white, cishet woman shat on trans women. Again. The same bullshit from the feminism of my teens continuing unabated twenty-five years on. The word feminism is so hot right now, but youse all have to understand it hasn’t been great for a lot of us, who aren’t the right kind of woman, or don’t live the right kind of life. It’s actively tried to erase us, legislated against us, denied us our rights and selfhood, incited hatred and violence. That’s your feminism. Go and learn your history, then come back and clean up your mess.

I was thinking of political parties last night, and the term, ‘to stay on message’. I wonder if it’s so difficult for white feminists to stay on message because they think they’re exceptional and the message doesn’t apply to them. So here’s the message:

Every time you talk about feminism, you say:

Trans women are women, and suffer discrimination at a higher rate than cis women. The issues facing trans women are our issues and are feminist issues.

Non-binary and gender non-conforming people suffer discrimination at a higher rate than heteronormative-presenting cis women. Their issues are our issues, and are feminist issues.

First Nations and Indigenous women and non-binary people face greater discrimination and barriers than white women, and face specific generational trauma. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Black, brown, POC, and BAME women and non-binary people face greater discrimination and barriers than white women. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Muslim women and non-binary people face specific discrimination and barriers that non-Muslim women do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Women and and non-binary people with immigrant histories face specific discrimination and barriers that women without this history do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Women and non-binary people with disabilities face specific discrimination and barriers that women without disabilities do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Women and non-binary people who do sex work face specific discrimination and barriers that women who do not work in this field do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Women and non-binary people who are in prison face specific issues and hardships, more so for trans women and men. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Working class, poor, un- and underemployed women and non-binary people face specific issues and hardships, that educated, middle-class women do not. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Queer women and non-binary people suffer discrimination at a higher rate than heterosexual, cisgender-presenting women. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Intersex women and non-binary people suffer discrimination at a higher rate than non-intersex women, and are often subject to non-consensual surgeries. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Reproductive health is not just for cisgender women. Some men have uteruses, or menstruate, or are capable of pregnancy; some women have penises; some have both or neither. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues.

Many women and non-binary people belong to multiple combinations of the above, they face specific and amplified overlapping discrimination, barriers, and ostracism. The issues facing them are our issues and are feminist issues. This is intersectional feminism.

This is not an exhaustive list. The language will date rapidly, indeed it already is clunky. That’s both on language and on me. My ability to even formulate such a list is due to the many women and non-binary people whom I have learnt from, FNI, Black, Muslim, immigrant, queer, trans women and non-binary people. There are faces I see with each of those sentences.

The history of feminism is intrinsically tied to the history of colonialism, white supremacy, and oppression. It is as much prone to essentialist nationalism of the body as racist nationalism is, with all the imperatives towards taxonomising, segregating, and labelling bodies as acceptable or not, human or not. If you want to use this word, you must reckon with its history, with what has been done, to whom, in its name. The above list is the bare minimum, even less. That’s the work that has to be done if feminism wants to claim for itself the bodies of women — and even then, there will be many of us who want no part in your feminism. You have to live with that, and do the work to make amends.

It is work. It is hard, ceaseless, decades and generations long work. It’s work you have to do, and it’s work you can do. When I think of where my interests and attention lay a decade ago, I cringe at how shallow my grasp of this was, in no small part because my grasp of myself and my own history was also shallow. I fuck up, make mistakes, apologise, try to do better, learn from my betters — who have far more pressing concerns on their time than me using it — try pass on that learning and rep them whenever I can, sit down and shut up when it’s not my place, speak up when it’s required, remind myself that people can change and it’s my obligation to encourage this. There’s no embossed certificate at the end of this, no letters before or after your name for all the work you have to do, on yourself first and those around you once you start to get it, you won’t be finished in three or six years, or sixty. But that’s the work, it’s the bare fucking minimum.

Lately I think it’s not for lack of knowing all this stuff that is causing white cis women to dependably shit on the rest of us. I think they do know all this, they’ve heard it their whole lives but they’ve decided they don’t care. It’s not that they don’t know about the issues facing trans women, they are quite sure we’re not women. They do think brown and black immigrants — especially Muslims — are terrorists or genetically misogynist. They truly believe that because it wasn’t them doing the invading and colonising, it’s not their fault, and damned if they’ll take any responsibility. And on and on down the list, making an exception for each one, not my problem, fuck you mate, I’m alright.

I’m saying this as someone who grew up in a white world and was told that was what I also was. Extricating myself from that, knowing my history, is lifelong work. And that’s also what we fight against: the breaking of history and community, atomising each of us, leaving us in one generation without the means to speak to our grandparents, or even knowing who they were. This erasing of history is the greatest ongoing work of colonialism and white supremacy. If feminism wants to stand against anything, wants to contribute anything of worth, it must stand against that, 500 years of that. And in that, white cis feminists must understand that the answers and ways out of this aren’t going to come from them.

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Currently in: Berlin

supernaut is Frances d’Ath. She has blogged here since 2004. You can find her performances and choreography at francesdath.info. Her design work is at francesdath.name. Frances would like to remind you that I am not my blog (though she likes WordPress very much).